Barbara Bosworth

Since moving to New England in 1984, Barbara Bosworth (born 1953) has been photographing the sea and its awe-inspiring ability to transform sky, water and light. The sea evokes calm introspection, romance and poetry, while remaining a deeply unknowable and overpowering natural force, a contradiction that has drawn people to the shoreline for millennia. Before she discovered photography, and for as long as she can remember, Bosworth has been looking at the sea. Many hours were spent with her father watching the light move across Cape Cod Bay. Later in life, she walked those same beaches with the wonder that had been passed down by her father, as well as generations of writers, poets and artists. This book of Bosworth's photographs of the sea, made with an 8x10 camera, follows in the tradition of The Meadow and The Heavens, serving as the third and final volume in the series, keeping the same size and design elements as the previous two publications.

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A follow-up to her successful 2015 book The Meadow, this project focuses on Boston-based photographer Barbara Bosworth's (born 1953) images of the moon, sun and sky. Made over the past several years with an 8x10 camera, the star images are hour-long exposures with the camera mounted on a clock drive so that the stars are rendered as dots instead of streaks. The sun and moon images are made with a telescope attached to Bosworth's camera.

Speaking of her inspiration for these series, Bosworth writes: "Every clear night of the summer my father would go out for a walk to look at the night sky. Many nights I would join him. We knew the North Star, and the Big Bear, but the rest became our own. At times we stood still for an hour or more to watch for shooting stars. We had no agenda. It was all about amazement at a sky full of stars. With this sense of wonder, I began making photographs of the Heavens. In these days of the Hubble Telescope and its spectacular imagery from deep space, I wanted a reminder of the mystery of our own night sky."

The book also includes facsimile editions of three artist's books that Bosworth has made as a nod to Galileo's 17th-century publications in which he first observed the skies through a telescope.